The most stolen books in South African bookstores are self-help books

Self-Helpless by Rebecca Davis is a hilarious and tongue-in-cheek look at the culture of the 'self-help' industry.

What does your love of self-help reads really say about you? We hear from the author of Self-Helpless, Rebecca Davis.

In her new book, Self-Helpless, Rebecca Davis, with her trademark self-deprecating and witty humour examines just what it means to “find the path to enlightenment.”

The next time you visit a branch of Exclusive Books, have a look around for a glass display case which is kept locked. To inspect something within it, you have to call a store attendant with a key to open it up for you.

This is where they keep the books that are most frequently stolen from the store.

I was browsing at the Exclusive Books at the V&A Waterfront when the cabinet in question caught my eye.

Here’s what it contained.

A number of volumes about Black Consciousness and prominent figures of the movement.

One of the only people currently attempting to fill it is former bank robber-turned-politician Gayton Mckenzie. Mckenzie’s books feature prominently in the Exclusive Books theft cabinet I mentioned earlier.

Mckenzie publishes his books in collaboration with his bestie, Kenny “Sushi King” Kunene, and he sells them in quantities that would make most South African authors murderous with envy.

On his website, which gives the price of his books in dollars – Mckenzie doesn’t mess around – he claims that A Hustler’s Bible: Words To Hustle By was a “no.1 national bestseller”. This is entirely possible.

In his second self-help book, 2014’s The Uncomfortable Truth, McKenzie veered away from teaching people how to hustle, and decided instead to teach women how to keep a man.

It is a fabulous read for any woman looking for the necessary inspiration to embark on a mass shooting.

“When the bedroom door closes, no man has time for crossed legs,” McKenzie warns women.

Don’t be like that. Be the girl who “likes to be pounded like they’re a piece of steak being tenderised under a butcher’s hammer”.

The Uncomfortable Truth was also a runaway success for Mckenzie, so there is clearly a market for these folksy ideas.

His title choices are also inspired. Self-help titles featuring the definite article plus a noun are guaranteed smash hits in this industry. The Secret. The Rules. The Uncomfortable Truth. They scream authority.

Books giving grown-ups permission to retreat from the hellish demands of modern adult life are only one part of a wider trend sweeping the self-help industry beyond publishing.

They scream uncomfortable truths.

More provocative titles are also currently very much in vogue. It’s a trend that seems to have originated with 2015’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck.

One is tempted to point out that you clearly do give a little bit of a f*ck if you can’t write “f*ck” without an asterisk on the front cover, but that’s not the point.

Irreverent, cheeky, even downright rude: these qualities are very now in the self-help world.

Presumably consumers interpret a blunt use of earthy language as evidence of refreshing “I-call-a-spade-a-spade” wisdom.

WATCH: Debunking Myths with Rebecca Davis and Haji Mohamed Dawjee

There’s another phenomenon on the rise in self-help publishing at the moment, I rapidly discovered.

For recent big hits of this nature, please see Pause: Harnessing the Life-changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break, or Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, or Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking.

Turns out all adults want is for another adult to whisper soothingly that they should really consider having a little lie-down.

Books giving grown-ups permission to retreat from the hellish demands of modern adult life are only one part of a wider trend sweeping the self-help industry beyond publishing. That trend consists of allowing adults to regress to an infantile state of safety and comfort.

One of its most extreme recent manifestations has been the Japanese practice of Otonamaki, or adult wrapping.

In these therapy sessions, adults are literally swaddled in cloth from head to toe and then gently rocked from side to side – like a newborn baby.

I’m disappointed to say that this craze has not yet reached South Africa. But something you can do locally is buy yourself a “weighted blanket” online.

These are blankets filled with pellets to give them special heft. When you wrap yourself in one, they are intended to replicate the feeling of being securely held. They were originally developed for use by children with autism – but are now increasingly in demand by anxious adults too.

Then, of course, there are adult colouring-in books – another aspect of this apparently widespread desire to give up on doing your taxes and revert to sitting on a tiny plastic chair with a crayon.

As I discovered when dabbling in this world, it is apparently almost compulsory for adults to colour in mandalas.

Some of the only alternatives are minutely-detailed leaf or flower patterns.

If you were the type of sloppy child who found staying within the lines to be a massive snore, as I was, let me assure you that your feelings are unlikely to have changed with the passage of time.

Perhaps one reason why adults want to re-do their childhoods might be that some of us didn’t pick up on the basics the first time around.

I say this because a number of recent self-help books are premised on the following: Take the kind of crushingly obvious instruction every mother should give every child, and stretch its wisdom over the length of an entire book.

I read a number of these, but my stand-out favourite was William H McRaven’s 2017 bestseller Make Your Bed: Small Things That Can Change Your Life… and Maybe the World.

McRaven, a US navy commander, informs us in his book that one reason why Saddam Hussein met a sticky end was because of Hussein’s persistent failure to make his bed.

McRaven was tasked with interrogating the dictator in his Baghdad cell every day towards the end of Hussein’s life, so he saw the unmade bed with his own eyes. And he judged it harshly.

You might argue that Saddam Hussein came unstuck for a few reasons beyond his ruffled sheets, but personally I’m not interested. As a long-term believer in the psychological benefits of bed-making myself, I greeted McRaven’s theory with unbridled glee.

“Why must we make the bed?” I now ask my wife daily, while smoothing down the duvet.

“Because we don’t want to end up like Saddam,” Haji dutifully replies.